AKG Q701

AKG Q701 review

AKG has enlisted the help of legendary music producer god, Quincy Jones, with its new range of high-quality headphones. Musicians endorse all sorts of things and for all sorts of reasons, and even good ones don't necessarily have good sonic taste – we can vouch for that from personal experience. But we are much less inclined to be cynical about AKG's gesture of donating a share of the proceeds from these headphones to Jones's foundation which aims to make music education 'an ongoing part of the lives of American children'. We're all for that. And we're all for new, high-quality headphones. We've been properly spoiled recently by some memorably fine models from Grado, Sennheiser and Audio-Technica and we're in the mood for more. New tech AKG has a good track record and we've fond memories of models going back decades. With the new Q701, features that stand out in the specification include flat-wire voice coils and two-layer diaphragms. Both of these are relatively common in loudspeakers, but the smaller dimensions of headphone drive units make them harder to implement and AKG must have spent some time over the microscope working these out.